Home Sweet Home

I remember that’s how they spoke.  That cadence.  All of them embittered.  Resentful.  I was probably the same myself.  How could I not be?  I felt like that for sure after the EU Referendum and during the aftermath.  I had it, too, when I came back here last summer.  Let’s say I wasn’t looking for the good.  But twenty plus years of mediation leave their mark.  All those strangers and their strange ideas.  No room for all that here.  Never was.  I got that feeling during the Brexit shit fest, too.  Fate’s fickle finger.  Here I am.  Head-on collision.

I’ve made some readjustments.  That mumbled menace heard through the floor.  Taunts and insults in return for reasonable suggestions.  Bugger off!  Piss off!  The violence in the eyes; the spite in the voice.  The quivering chin.  Jabbing finger.  The need to tell me if I’d suggested something such as change of clothes or bathing to aunts and uncles, they’d have smashed my face in or maybe knocked my head off.  Did it really take so long to notice something wasn’t right?

I tell myself I’m distanced from that horrid intonation.  I see it all from thirty-eight thousand feet.  It looks better from there.  I visualise a room where I looked him in the eye and reflected; let the demons and insecurities fall to the floor and appraised what remained, and found I liked it more.

Well

I think I’m grateful

Memory’s a used car salesman

But I don’t feel cheated anymore

The anger’s gone.  I simply don’t belong

A mantra has been forming

Unnoticed

Like a new leaf on a stem:

Accept the world for what it is

And lean the way you lean.

Simple.  Not Earth-shattering, but I couldn’t have seen that twenty-odd years ago.

All those insecurities they’d worked so hard to give me.  Their gift of continuity. 

Strangers and their strange ideas

Maybe there was something different all along 

It was always about horizons and the roads that take you there.

I always believed there must be something over the curve.  And now I know there is.